Staughton Lynd

Staughton Lynd was born in 1929 and grew up in New York City. His parents, Robert and Helen Lynd, coauthored the well-known Middletown books. Staughton went through the schools of the Ethical Culture Society. Above the auditorium of the main school are written the words “The place where men meet to seek the highest is holy ground.”

Staughton Lynd received a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD from Columbia, and a JD from the University of Chicago. He taught American history at Spelman College in Atlanta, where one of his students was the future Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Alice Walker, and at Yale University.

Staughton served as director of Freedom Schools in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964. In April 1965, he chaired the first march against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC. In August 1965, he was arrested together with Bob Moses and David Dellinger at the Assembly of Unrepresented People in Washington DC, where demonstrators sought to declare peace with the people of Vietnam on the steps of the Capitol. In December 1965, Staughton along with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker made a controversial trip to Hanoi, in hope of clarifying the peace terms of the Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.

Because of his advocacy and practice of civil disobedience, Lynd was unable to continue as a full-time history teacher. The history departments at five Chicago-area universities offered him positions, only to have the offers negatived by the school administrations. In 1976, Staughton became a lawyer and until his retirement at the end of 1996 worked for Legal Services in Youngstown, Ohio. He specialized in employment law, and when the steel mills in Youngstown were closed in 1977–1980 he served as lead counsel to the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley, which sought to reopen the mills under worker-community ownership, and brought the action Local 1330 v. U.S. Steel.

Staughton Lynd and Alice Niles met in Cambridge. Alice’s parents were in the process of becoming Friends, and Staughton had become aware of Quakerism through a cousin who served as an ambulance driver during World War II. They were married at the Stony Run Meeting House in Baltimore in 1951. They have three children and seven grandchildren. In the early 1960s they became convinced Friends and joined the Atlanta Friends Meeting. They are presently members of the 57th Street Meeting in Chicago.

The Lynds have jointly edited four books: Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians; Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History, revised edition (Orbis Books, 1995, now in its sixth printing); Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers; and, most recently, The New Rank and File (Cornell University Press, 2000), which includes oral histories of labor activists in the past quarter century. Since retiring, Staughton has been Local Education Coordinator for Teamsters Local 377 in Youngstown. The Lynds are deeply involved in efforts to respond to the growing number of prisons in Youngstown, and regularly visit a number of incarcerated men, including George Skatzes (pronounced “skates”) who is on Death Row. They were of counsel in a major class action, Austin v. Wilkinson, filed in January 2001, which challenges the constitutionality of conditions at Ohio’s new “super-max” prison in Youngstown, the Ohio State Penitentiary. The litigation ended in March 2008.

Read the revised and expanded 98-page article, “Moral Injury and Conscientious Objection: Saying No to Military Service,” by Alice Lynd with the assistance of Staughton Lynd now online at
http://historiansagainstwar.org/resources/militaryservice.pdf

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Praise

“The concept of ‘moral injury,’ so powerfully outlined and then enriched through elegant choreography of data, personal anecdotes, and medical definitions, brings us all some solace.”
—Doug Rawlings, cofounder of Veterans for Peace, Vietnam veteran

“An emotionally difficult read that will gnaw at your value system, jerk at your humanity, and light a fire under you to take action. This book tears down the prevailing societal scaffolding which reveres war and violence, and with oh-so-gentle hands reconstructs a future built with the utmost respect for the individual, unwavering wisdom of collective nonviolent action, and dogged demand for accountability. Break the cycle of violence before it breaks us all!”
—Sam Bahour, coeditor with Staughton and Alice Lynd of Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians

“This book links the damage done to soldiers and prisoners: the complex ways in which our society uses and abuses the generations we should be empowering rather than destroying. It is a must read for anyone concerned about survival with integrity.”
—Margaret Randall, author of Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression

“Society commemorates wars but tends to forget its veterans, who often return home plagued by shame and guilt for killing; many prisoners also carry the weight of their violent actions and the Lynds do a remarkable job in connecting the struggles of the two without equating them.”
—Carl Mirra, associate professor, Adelphi University, Marine Corps resister and author of Soldiers and Citizens: An Oral History of Operation Iraqi Freedom from the Battlefield to the Pentagon

“Staughton and Alice Lynd have accompanied today’s executioners and victims, the soldiers and prisoners of today’s empire, on and off death row, in and out of court, by law and by direct action. With decades of experience, courage, patience, and intelligence they listen, learn, and record individual human beings in the belly of the beast who struggle to forgive and to resist. The collaboration results in the highest human faculty of moral reasoning that promises to link the individual, suffering human conscience to restored humanity. Empire cannot withstand even the hint, much less the fulfillment of such promise!”
—Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto and Stop, Thief!

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Praise

“Solidarity Unionism is an essential text for all rank-and-file workers as well as labor activists. Beautifully succinct, it outlines how CIO unions grew into an ineffectual model for rank-and-file empowerment, and provides examples of how alternative labor organizations have flourished in the wake of this. Lynd illustrates to a new generation of workers that we do have alternatives, and his call for a qualitatively different kind of labor organization gives us an ideological and strategic framework that we can apply in our day-to-day struggles on the shop floor.”
—Diane Krauthamer, Industrial Worker

“Solidarity Unionism is based in a vision of genuine democracy. It’s accessibly written and rich in practical examples. I’ve used it successfully in study groups and labor education courses both to draw out and learn from participants’ own experiences and to plan our next steps in struggles. Challenging some of what are conventionally thought of as “wins” (e.g., dues checkoff or signed contracts), the book impels the kind of strategic thinking otherwise lacking in most of labor and the Left.”
—Norm Diamond, former president, Pacific Northwest Labor College and coauthor of The Power in Our Hands

“Brother Staughton Lynd continues to offer an informed, critical voice and many important ideas for today’s labor movement. Anyone fighting for a better world for working people will be glad to read this revised edition of Solidarity Unionism, and to pass it on to students, friends, and fellow workers.”
—Michael Honey, Haley Professor of Humanities, University of Washington–Tacoma and author of Going Down Jericho Road

“Staughton Lynd’s Solidarity Unionism mines his decades of labor activism and a century of American workers’ struggles to shine a beacon on an alternative path that replaces top-down labor organization with local autonomy and community-level networking. Before you despair of reasserting workers’ rights and power, read Solidarity Unionism!”
—Jeremy Brecher, Labor Network for Sustainability, author of Strike!

“In Solidarity Unionism, workers are protagonists, not spectators, and that makes all the difference in the world. Staughton Lynd’s ideas will be at the heart of the next mass worker rising.”
—Daniel Gross, executive director of Brandworkers and cofounder of IWW Starbucks Workers Union

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Praise

“Since our dreams for a more just world came crashing down around us in the late 1980s and early 1990s, those of us involved in social activism have spent much of the time since trying to assess what went wrong and what we might learn from our mistakes. In this highly readable book, Lynd explores the difference between organizing and accompanying. This book is a must-read for anyone who believes a better world is possible.”
—Margaret Randall

“Everything that Staughton Lynd writes is original and provocative. This little book is no exception. Among his greatest contributions on display here is the transformation of the ‘organizer’ and ‘organized’ into a collaboration of different people with different skills, each making a decisive contribution.”
—Paul Buhle, author of Robin Hood: People’s Outlaw and Forest Hero

“Accompanying is arguably the most thoughtful examination of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s concept of accompaniment insofar as it helps us to understand how liberation theology matured from taking a ‘preferential option for the poor’ to companionship with the poor as they organize themselves… This legacy flows into the Occupy Movement today when it reclaims foreclosed homes, and occupies banks and spaces collectively and spontaneously. This book would be important at any moment in history, but is indispensable today as we accompany one another in the quest to free ourselves from the shackles of the world the 1 percent has inflicted on us.”
—Carl Mirra, Associate Professor of Education, Adelphi University, and author of The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970

“I like this book very much. The fact that it is based on Alice and Staughton’s own experiences of accompanying makes it a very valuable tool for understanding and promoting the notion.”
—Father Joe Mulligan, SJ

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Description

Legendary legal scholar Staughton Lynd teams up with influential labor organizer Daniel Gross in this exposition on solidarity unionism, the do-it-yourself workplace organizing system that is rapidly gaining prominence around the country and around the world. Lynd and Gross make the audacious argument that workers themselves on the shop floor, not outside union officials, are the real hope for labor’s future. Utilizing the principles of solidarity unionism, any group of co-workers, like the workers at Starbucks, can start building an organization to win an independent voice at work without waiting for a traditional trade union to come and “organize” them. Indeed, in a leaked recording of a conference call, the nation’s most prominent union-busting lobbyist coined a term, “the Starbucks problem,” as a warning to business executives about the risk of working people organizing themselves and taking direct action to improve issues at work.

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Praise

“I met Staughton and Alice Lynd nearly fifty years ago in Atlanta. Staughton’s reflective and restless life has never ceased in its exploring. This book is his great gift to the next generations.” —Tom Hayden

“Staughton Lynd’s work is essential reading for anyone dedicated to implementing social justice. The essays collected in this book provide unique wisdom and insights into United States history and possibilities for change, summed up in two tenets: Leading from below and Solidarity.” —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

“This remarkable collection demonstrates the compassion and intelligence of one of America’s greatest public intellectuals. To his explorations of everything from Freedom Schools to the Battle of Seattle, Staughton Lynd brings lyricism, rigour, a historian’s eye for irony, and an unshakable commitment to social transformation. In this time of economic crisis, when the air is filled with ideas of ‘hope’ and ‘change,’ Lynd guides us to understanding what, very concretely, those words might mean and how we might get there. These essays are as vital and relevant now as the day they were written, and a source of inspiration for activists young and old.” —Raj Patel

“The Staughton Lynd Reader is a veritable treasure chest. Lynd shows unparalleled respect for rank-and-file movements. If you’re interested in broad social change and meaningful democracy, you simply must read Staughton Lynd.” —Daniel Gross

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Praise

“Mr. Lynd is a masterful storyteller and he has a hell of a story to tell. [He] has written a definitive history of one of the longest prison riots in U.S. history and its aftermath. That alone is worth the price of admission… What makes the book unique in the historical sense is the remarkable range of primary and secondary sources; Lynd writes with a lawyer’s pen but a poet’s ear… This book is a reminder that prisoners—even death row prisoners—are human beings, too. Lucasville is a resounding affirmation of our common humanity.”
—Michael Mello, author of The Wrong Man: A True Story of Innocence on Death Row”

There is a temperature at which the welder’s torch becomes so hot and burns with such purity that its flame is no longer yellow, orange, or red, but burns blue. Then it is capable of cutting through steel. Staughton Lynd wields the blue flame of truth, cutting through the lies, threats, evasions, and misrepresentations of the authorities of the state of Ohio.”
—Professor Peter Linebaugh, Department of History, University of Toledo; author of The London Hanged and co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra

“Lucasville is one of the most powerful indictments of our ‘justice system’ I have ever read. What comes across is a litany of flaws deep in the system, and recognizably not unique to Lucasville. The detailed transcripts (yes, oral history!) give great power to the whole story.”
—Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States”Of interest to anyone who follows prison politics or the often enigmatic workings of the justice system.”
—Library Journal

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Praise

“Workers’ rights are under attack on every front. Bosses break the law every day. For 30 years Labor Law for the Rank and Filer has been arming workers with an introduction to their legal rights (and the limited means to enforce them) while reminding everyone that real power comes from workers’ solidarity.” —Alexis Buss, former general secretary-treasurer of the IWW

“As valuable to working persons as any hammer, drill, stapler, or copy machine, Labor Law for the Rank and Filer is a damn fine tool empowering workers who struggle to realize their basic dignity in the workplace while living through an era of unchecked corporate greed. Smart, tough, and optimistic, Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross provide nuts and bolts information to realize on-the-job rights while showing us that another world is not only possible but inevitable.” —John Philo, legal director, Maurice and Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice

“Lynd and Gross are to be commended for developing a useful resource not just for shop stewards, but for every wage-earner engaged in the struggle to improve the condition of working people.” —Gordon Simmons, UE Local 170

“For those readers who want to strengthen workers rights and improve our overall quality of life, or for those who may see labor organizing as also a strategy to achieve not only the vision of a participatory economy but a participatory society as well then this book should definitely be in your arsenal.” —Michael McGehee, Z Magazine

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Praise

“There’s no doubt that we’ve lost much of our history. It’s also very clear that those in power in this country like it that way. Here’s a book that shows us why. It demonstrates not only that another world is possible, but that it already exists, has existed, and shows an endless potential to burst through the artificial walls and divisions that currently imprison us. An exquisite contribution to the literature of human freedom, and coming not a moment too soon.”
–David Graeber, author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Direct Action: An Ethnography

“In these desperate, often tragic, times, we look backward, forward, even to our dreams to be able to keep imagining a world in which justice may be part of more people’s lives. We look to lives lived before ours, to stories and their meanings, to strategies culled from the worlds of politics or ancient wisdoms. We look in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and here in the United States. We are willing to entertain any new idea or revamped strategy. Staughton Lynd’s life and work put him in a unique position to seek out someone like Grubacic, ask the pertinent questions, and tell the meaningful stories. Grubacic’s experience perfectly compliments Lynd’s. Here we have the best of a non-dogmatic Marxism listening to a most creative and humane anarchism. But this book is never weighted down by unforgiving theory. Just the opposite: it is a series of conversations where the reader feels fully present. It provides a marvelous framework for enriching the conversation that’s never really stopped: about how we may make this world a better place.”
—Margaret Randall, author of Sandino’s Daughters, When I Look Into the Mirror and See You, and Narrative of Power

“I have been in regular contact with Andrej Grubacic for many years, and have been most impressed by his searching intelligence, broad knowledge, lucid judgment, and penetrating commentary on contemporary affairs and their historical roots. He is an original thinker and dedicated activist, who brings deep understanding and outstanding personal qualities to everything he does.” —Noam Chomsky

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Book Events

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Reviews

• The Staughton Lynd Factor: A Dispatch from the Frontline Trenches of Higher Education in Middle America
• Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism
• New Forms of Worker Organization in Industrial Worker
• New Forms of Worker Organization on Center for a Stateless Society
• Review: Alt-Labor or Not, It Will Take Rank-and-File Power to Revive Us
• What North American Unions Can Learn from Labor Organizers Abroad
• New Forms of Worker Organization: A Library Journal Review
• New Forms of Worker Organization in Anthropology of Work Review
• New Forms of Worker Organization: A CHOICE Review
• Workers’ Self-Empowerment
• New Forms of Worker Organization Reviewed in Labor Studies Journal
• New Forms of Worker Organization Reviewed in Anarchist Studies
• Some Thoughts on Synthesis and Political Identity
• Can We Make a New Haymarket Synthesis?
• Staughton Lynd Tackles Wobblies and Zapatistas
• Book Review: Wobblies and Zapatistas
• Wobblies and Zapatistas Reviewed by PMR
• Until the Rulers Obey: A review by Staughton Lynd in Z Magazine
• The Return of Staughton Lynd
• Staughton Lynd Interviewed on Writerscast
• From Here To There In Labor Studies Journal
• Can We Make a New Haymarket Synthesis?
• Alternative Action
• Union Victory at Starbucks
• Book Review: Wobblies and Zapatistas
• Anarchism, Marxism, and Zapatismo
• Anarchism, Marxism and Victor Serge on Counterpunch
• What Can We Do
• Labor Law For the Rank and Filer Review
• Labor Law for the Rank and Filer in PMR
• Re-Forging the Working Class
• Some Thoughts on Synthesis and Political Identity
• Staughton Lynd tackles Wobblies and Zapatistas
• From Here to There: A Review
• The Staughton Lynd Factor: A Dispatch from the Frontline Trenches of Higher Education in Middle America
• Labor Law for the Rank and Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law
• Accompany for Change in Publishers Weekly
• Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change in In These Times
• Reading on a prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio
• Mayday, mayday! A new kind of unionism for a changing world
• Solidarity, Not Bureaucracy— Building Workplace Organizations Anew
• Solidarity Unionism reviewed in Waging NonViolence
• No Just War
• Resistance to Military and Prison Violence on H-Socialisms
• Moral Injury and Nonviolent Resistance: A Review
• Accompany for Change

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Interviews

• Solidarity Unionism Today: An Interview with Staughton Lynd
• Today on Your Call: What’s the Relevance of Anarchism Today?
• Andrej Grubacic: Reconsidering Yugoslav Socialism
• Anarchism, Marxism, and Zapatismo
• Dismantling the Self-Constructed Barrier
• Video of discussion on Wobblies and Zapatistas at Bluestockings Books
• Anarchism, Marxism, and Zapatismo
• Wobblies and Zapatistas on ZNet
• The Staughton Lynd Reader on ZNet
• Lucasville Five Hunger Strike Begins –An interview with author Staughton Lynd
• Prisoners at Supermax Ohio Penitentiary Begin Hunger Strike to Protest 17+ Year Solitary Confinement
• An Interview With Staughton Lynd About the Labor Movement
• An Interview With Staughton & Alice Lynd: Social Justice Champions

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Mentions

• The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers & Uber Drivers: Labor Law for the Rank and Filer in the NYTs
• The Staughton Lynd Factor
• Saving Our Unions: Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win?

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Blog

• Solidarity Unionism Today: An Interview with Staughton Lynd
• Staughton Lynd on Burglar for Peace
• Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks: The IWW uses Section 7, with co-author Staughton Lynd
• History From the Bottom Up
• Is the Iraq War Illegal
• Solidarity
• Howard Zinn: Historian
• A Welcome Prison Victory at Youngstown
• Power to the People
• Is There Anything More to Say About the Rosenberg Case?
• Moral Injury on Ohio Prisons Banned Books List